Tesla is expanding its team to develop the humanoid robot Optimus.
Over the past year, it has hired dozens of employees to train the robot using motion capture suits, reports Business Insider.
The «Data Collection Operator» role involves performing tasks in a special suit and virtual reality goggles for more than seven hours a day. Candidates should be between 170 and 180 centimeters tall, which corresponds to the size of the Optimus robot itself. Elon Musk has previously stated that Optimus will be approximately 173 centimeters tall.
Employees will collect data, analyze it, and write daily reports. Tesla offers full-time with a salary of $25.25 to $48 per hour. The company is hiring for various shifts, including night shifts.
Animesh Garg, senior researcher at Nvidia Research and professor of robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says:
«The work involves collecting data by performing tasks in a motion capture suit that are recorded for later analysis, as well as directly controlling the humanoid robot».
Last year, Tesla released a video in which an operator wearing a motion-capture suit and haptic gloves lifts objects, and a virtual version of the Optimus robot repeats these movements.
Multiple fully Tesla-made Bots now walking around & learning about the real world 🤖
Join the Tesla AI team → https://t.co/dBhQqg1qya pic.twitter.com/3TZ2znxkfd
— Tesla Optimus (@Tesla_Optimus) May 16, 2023
Garg estimates that hundreds of thousands to millions of hours of data need to be collected to train Optimus to work in Tesla’s factories.
«It could cost half a billion dollars, and even then, success is not guaranteed», — he adds.
The use of motion capture suits for robot training is not new, but Tesla is one of the first companies to apply this practice on such a large scale to a wide range of common tasks.
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